p. 412 | WATER THE ROOTS

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 16, 1880

WATER THE ROOTS.

ONE sweetly says, "In a window, this summer, there was a flower-pot containing a plant whose use it was to be odorous and beautiful. The leaves were just beginning to curl up. I poured a cup of water into the saucer in which the flower-pot stood, and a child looking on asked, "Why did you not rather pour water on the leaves?" It was a child that asked, and I explained the reason; adding, that when God would bring beauty and fragrance and healthfulness into our lives, he waters us at the roots."

It is even so; and yet how many there are just like that child. The leaf is everything to them, the root nothing. "Why dwell so much on the love of Christ," they say, "and on faith in him, and on the atonement, and conversion, and the other doctrines of grace, when, after all, it is better morality we need, and better living and acting?" They forget that there is nothing more practical for all kinds of true work than letting the love of Christ "get in about the roots of our being."—Record and Evangelist.